A lesser-known campaign that I’ve found to be useful especially for eCommerce is the Facebook birthday campaign. Facebook is famous for its targeting or maybe it’s infamous for it. But most marketers only focus on demographic targetings like age and gender or affinity groups like fans of TV shows or political parties. But there’s a whole subsection of targeting called, “Life Events.”
There’s a whole host of interesting ways to target people under that subsection and I would encourage you to explore it.
Can You Target People About to Celebrate a Brithday on Facebook?
There are two ways to target people about to celebrate a birthday on Facebook.
The first way is to select Demographics > Life Events > Birthday and then pick “Upcoming Birthday.” This allows you to target people who have a birthday coming up in the next week.
The second way is to select Demographics > Life Events > Birthday > Birthday Month and then pick the relevant months.
I prefer to use the first way as it’s a constant way to always get new users to target. The second method is nice in that you can target people for longer than the week leading up to their birthday, but it needs manual updating. It’s good for campaigns that have definite stop and start dates.
How To Setup Your Facebook Birthday Campaign
The great thing about this type of targeting is that you can get specific. When I run a Facebook birthday campaign ad I explicitly say “Happy Birthday.” Their upcoming birthday is on their mind and someone wishing them a happy birthday is sure to get their attention.
Because it is a birthday I always try to frame my ethical bribe or a feature of the product as a birthday gift. So the copy generally looks like this:
“Happy Birthday!!! This year we want to give you the gift of feeling great/stronger/sexier/etc..”
Use your copywriting skills to frame it however you see best. But as you can see it flows naturally. I find that a Facebook birthday campaign is usually one of the easier campaigns to write copy for.
The Facebook birthday campaign also works great with video ads. You can make a video with balloons, and cake wishing the user a happy birthday and then going into your pitch. I’d use the same “gift” framing when doing the video.
I love the Facebook birthday campaign because there’s a built-in targeting gimmick that just kind of makes things easier. The copy writing is easier. There’s no need to overthink the targeting. It’s just very straightforward and an evergreen campaign that has a constantly updating audience. So even your creative assets don’t need to be updated as frequently.
I’m a big fan and I think if you’re running ads, the Facebook birthday campaign strategy should be one you consider. It won’t work for everyone, but I have found it to be quite effective.
As a side note, this is a campaign you should brag about to your client. They’ll think you’re a genius. For whatever reason, all my clients have always been impressed by this campaign type.
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